Tuesday Tones

Jessie Montgomery’s atmospheric and cyclical work “Rounds” is up this week. The piece, for piano and strings, takes inspiration from poet TS Eliot:

Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines :

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

(Text © T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd)

In addition to this inspiration, while working on the piece, I became fascinated by fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales) and also delved into the work of contemporary biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber who writes about the interdependency of all beings. Weber explores how every living organism has a rhythm that interacts and impacts with all of the living things around it and results in a multitude of outcomes.

Like Eliot in Four Quartets, beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment. I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift. (via)

Montgomery’s website has three bios available, marked Long, Medium, and Short! Here is the short bio:

Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year, her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post), and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists and underrepresented composers to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.

Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year.

I have found Rounds a fascinating work to hear as its sounds cycle back and forth. It’s a work that hovers around the edges of rhythm and melody in a particularly abstract and atmospheric way. I love works like this! At times it’s almost Ravelian in its impressionistic color, at other times it’s purely modern.